Tag Archives: Fastly

I’m about to take an extended vacation for the rest of the year and into the beginning of the next, so I decided I’d sum up the year from a curl angle already now, a few weeks early. (So some numbers will grow a bit more after this post.)

2017

So what did we do this year in the project, how did curl change?

The first curl release of the year was version 7.53.0 and the last one was 7.57.0. In the separate blog posts on 7.55.0, 7.56.0 and 7.57.0 you’ll note that we kept up adding new goodies and useful features. We produced a total of 9 releases containing 683 bug fixes. We announced twelve security problems. (Down from 24 last year.)

At least 125 different authors wrote code that was merged into curl this year, in the 1500 commits that were made. We never had this many different authors during a single year before in the project’s entire life time! (The 114 authors during 2016 was the previous all-time high.)

We added more than 160 new names to the THANKS document for their help in improving curl. The total amount of contributors is now over 1660.

This year we truly started to use travis for CI builds and grew from a mere two builds per commit and PR up to nineteen (with additional ones run on appveyor and elsewhere). The current build set is a very good verification that that most things still compile and work after a PR is merged. (see also the testing curl article).

In March 2017, we had our first ever curl get-together as we arranged curl up 2017 a weekend in Nuremberg, Germany. It was very inspiring and meeting parts of the team in real life was truly a blast. This was so good we intend to do it again: curl up 2018 will happen.

Also in May, we moved over the official curl site (and my personal site) to get hosted by Fastly. We were beginning to get problems to handle the bandwidth and load, and in one single step all our worries were graciously taken care of!

We got curl entered into the OSS-fuzz project, and Max Dymond even got a reward from Google for his curl-fuzzing integration work and thanks to that project throwing heaps of junk at libcurl’s APIs we’ve found and fixed many issues.

The source code (for the tool and library only) is now at about 143,378 lines of code. It grew around 7,057 lines during the year. The primary reasons for the code growth were:

the new libssh-powered SSH backend (not yet released)

the new mime API (in 7.56.0) and

the new multi-SSL backend support (also in 7.56.0).

Your maintainer’s view

Oh what an eventful year it has been for me personally.

The first interim meeting for QUIC took place in Japan, and I participated from remote. After all, I’m all set on having curl support QUIC and I’ll keep track of where the protocol is going! I’ve participated in more interim meetings after that, all from remote so far.

I talked curl on the main track at FOSDEM in early February (and about HTTP/2 in the Mozilla devroom). I’ve then followed that up and have also had the pleasure to talk in front of audiences in Stockholm, Budapest, Jönköping and Prague through-out the year.

I went to London and “represented curl” in the third edition of the HTTP workshop, where HTTP protocol details were discussed and disassembled, and new plans for the future of HTTP were laid out.

In late June I meant to go to San Francisco to a Mozilla “all hands” conference but instead I was denied to board the flight. That event got a crazy amount of attention and I received massive amounts of love from new and old friends. I have not yet tried to enter the US again, but my plan is to try again in 2018…

I wrote and published my h2c tool, meant to help developers convert a set of HTTP headers into a working curl command line.

The single occasion that overshadows all other events and happenings for me this year by far, was without doubt when I was awarded the Polhem Prize and got a gold medal medal from no other than his majesty the King of Sweden himself. For all my work and years spent on curl no less.

Not really curl related, but in November I was also glad to be part of the huge Firefox Quantum release. The biggest Firefox release ever, and one that has been received really well.

I’ve managed to commit over 800 changes to curl through the year, which is 54% of the totals and more commits than I’ve done in curl during a single year since 2005 (in which I did 855 commits). I explain this increase mostly on inspiration from curl up and the prize, but I think it also happened thanks to excellent feedback and motivation brought by my fellow curl hackers.

We’re running towards the end of 2017 with me being the individual who did most commits in curl every single month for the last 28 months.

2018?

I’ve run my own public web sites on hardware I’ve administered myself for over twenty years now. I’ve hosted the curl web site myself since it’s inception.

The curl web site at curl.haxx.se has recently been delivering roughly 1.5 terabyte of data to the world per month. The CA bundle we convert to PEM from the Mozilla source code, is alone downloaded more than 100,000 timesper day. Occasional blog entries I’ve posted here on my blog have climbed very fast on popular sites such as Hacker news and Reddit, and have resulted in intense visitor storms hitting this same server – sometimes reaching visitor counts above 200,000 “uniques” – most of them within the first few hours of the publication. At times, those visitor spikes have effectively brought the server to its knees.

Yes, my personal web site and the curl web site are both sharing the same physical server. It also hosts more than a dozen other sites and numerous services for our own pleasures and fun, providing services for a handful of different open source projects. So when the server has to cease doing work because it runs out of memory or hits other resource restraints, that causes interruptions all over. Oh yes, and my email doesn’t reach me.

Inconvenient and annoying.

The server

Haxx owns and runs this co-located server that we have a busload of web servers on – for the good of the projects and people that run things on it. This machine’s worst bottle neck is available RAM memory and perhaps I/O performance. Every time the server goes down to a crawl due to network traffic overload we discuss how we should upgrade it. Installing a new machine and transferring over all the sites and services is work. Work that none of us at Haxx are very happy to volunteer to do. So it hasn’t been done yet, and frankly the server handles the daily load just fine and without even a blink. Which is ninety nine point something percent of the time…

Haxx pays for a certain amount of network traffic so as long as we’re below some threshold we remain paying the same monthly fee. We don’t want to increase the traffic by magnitudes as that would cost more.

The specific machine, that sits deep inside a server room in Stockholm Sweden, is a five(?) years old Dell Poweredge E310, Intel Xeon X3440 2.53GHz with 8GB ram, This model is shown on the image at the top.

Alternatives that hasn’t helped

Why not a mirror system? We had a fair amount of curl site mirrors a few years ago, but it never worked well because they were always less reliable than the main site and they often turned stale and out of sync with the master site which eventually just hurt users.

They also trick visitors into bookmark or otherwise go back to the mirror site instead of the real one and there were always the annoying people who couldn’t resist but to fill the mirror with ads and stuff. Plus, they didn’t help much with with the storms to the main site.

Why not a cloud server? Because with the amount of services, servers and various things we do on our server, it would be inconvenient and expensive. But perhaps even more because we started out like this so we have invested time and energy into the infrastructure as it works right now. And I enjoy rowing my own boat!

The CDN

Fastly reached out and graciously offered to help us handle the load. Both on the account of traffic amounts but also to save our machine from struggling this hard the next time I’ll write something that tickles people’s curiosity (or rage) to that level when several thousands of visitors want to read the same article at the same time.

Starting now, the curl.haxx.se and the daniel.haxx.se web sites are fronted by Fastly. It should give web site visitors from all over the world faster response times and it will make the site more reliable and less likely to have problems due to traffic load going forward.

In case you’re not familiar with what a CDN is, a simplified explanation would say it is a globally distributed network of reverse proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers. These CDN servers front the Internet and will to the largest extent possible serve the visitors with the right content directly from their own caches instead of them reaching the actual lowly backend server I run that hosts the original content. Fastly has lots of servers across the globe for this purpose. Users who are a long way away from Sweden will probably be the ones who will notice this change the most, as you may suddenly find haxx.se content much closer (network round-trip wise) than before.

Standards

These new servers will host the sites over HTTPS just like before, and they will require TLS 1.2 and SNI. They will work over IPv6 and support HTTP/2. Network standard wise, there shouldn’t be any step down – and honestly, I haven’t exactly been on the cutting edge of these technologies myself for these sites in the past.

Editing the site

We will keep editing and maintaining the site like before. It is made up of an old system with templates and include files that generate mostly static web pages. The site is mostly available on github and using that, you can build a local version for development and trying out changes before they land.

Hopefully, this move to Fastly will only make the site faster and more reliable. If you notice any glitches or experience any problems with the site, please let us know!